


Becoming Prometheus

by shamusandstone (theleaveswant)



Category: Heroes - Fandom
Genre: Bloodplay, Child Abuse, F/M, Literary Reference, Music, Mythology - Freeform, Parent/Child Incest, Resurrection, Revenge, Rough Sex, Suicide Attempt, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-12
Updated: 2011-10-12
Packaged: 2017-10-24 13:17:18
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 8
Words: 7,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/263904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/shamusandstone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some people are like bad pennies. Bad pennies with plans and sticky stories.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Bought and Sold

**Author's Note:**

> I made a playlist for this fic, back in the day when I was writing it, with a track for each chapter and one bonus; you can download it [here](http://www.mediafire.com/?ry66xw5h40i50qb).

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Call it a prologue, on the beach between the end of “The Eclipse pt 2” and the beginning of “Our Father.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the last Heroes story I will ever post; the story I got into the fandom to tell. Has been sitting mostly finished on my hard drive for ages, finally decided to fill in the gaps as best as I can now, years later, and put it out there.
> 
> Content notes & warnings: For the series, general “mature content”--violence, gore, sex, 'coarse language'. For this part, braaaains.

_Nobody said that love was going to be kind_

Gabriel shifts their positions once the cut is complete, cradling her head in his lap while he runs his fingers over her exposed neocortex, reading her brain like braille. He tries not to look at her face while he works; her blue eyes staring so betrayed give him a crawling feeling he really, really doesn't like. When ignoring doesn't work he thumbs her eyelids shut.

Were anyone unlucky enough to find him in that moment, and foolish enough to ask him what he's doing, he would not be able to answer. He doesn't know what he's looking for – didn't honestly expect her to know whether the Petrellis were his birth parents or not, and knows he couldn't find out this way anyway. Still, he pores over the gray matter text, rarer and more precious than any first edition from his old library, looking for an answer to . . . whatever.

Eventually he stops, satisfied, or rather resigned to the knowledge that the jelly in his hands cannot give him what he needs. He replaces her calvarium, taking care to line it up straight and keep the wound clean and free of any stray hairs or grains of sand, and lays her back down on the beach.

He spends the remainder of the night crouched beside her, waiting for . . . something. Whatever it is, it never comes. The blood trickling down her face cools and congeals. By the time morning lights the beach enough to see she's pale and stiff, signs respectively of livor and rigor mortis. Plainly put: dead.

He sighs, wanders up the beach. Finds a bottle of lighter fluid in somebody's camp-out stash, and returns to the body. He looks away from her when the phone rings, concentrates on verbally envenoming Petrelli, then splashes out the rest of the fuel.

“Goodbye, Elle,” Sylar says, lighting the ad hoc pyre with a spark of her fingers (her spark, his fingers). He watches until the flames engulf her, then walks away without looking back.


	2. Head On

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More prologue; an interlude in the cell at Pinehearst.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the last Heroes story I will ever post; the story I got into the fandom to tell. Has been sitting mostly finished on my hard drive for ages, finally decided to fill in the gaps as best as I can now, years later, and put it out there.
> 
> Content notes & warnings: For the series, general “mature content”--violence, gore, sex, 'coarse language'. For this part, discussion of suicide and blurry allusion to violence and sexual, physical and psychological abuse of a child/adolescent.

_This secondhand living just won't do_

“It was you in the shop after all, then? You broke the rope.”

In a cell at the Pinehearst facility Elle and Gabriel sat side by side against the concrete wall, tired and sweaty and – what's the word? - companionable.

“Yeah, that was me.” Elle rubbed absently at the chafed skin on her wrists.

“I knew it. I mean even then I think I knew. Not consciously, of course, but on some level. Maybe it was the smell. Your unique perfume.”

“What are you talking about, what smell?”

“You smell like ozone, kind of. I guess it's released by your ability and then it sort of . . . lingers.” He noticed her frown and hastened to explain. “Not that it's a bad thing. It's not overpowering or anything. I actually kind of like it.” She glared at him a moment longer, then smiled, so he did too. “Anyway I smelled it in the shop that day we met, and after you left I had a song stuck in my head, walking home and for days afterwards. This song—you know 'Head On' by the Jesus and Mary Chain? Or by the Pixies, they recorded a cover of it too.”

“You like the Pixies?” She looked incredulous. “I mean, you liked them then?”

“What's surprising about that?”

“I just never figured you for a music fan. Not that kind of music, anyway. Maybe, like, Perry Como or something.”

“Then your surveillance team didn't check the place very thoroughly. I had a pretty sweet album collection, or I thought I did.” He frowned. “All collecting dust before I even met you. I lost interest in everything I used to enjoy months earlier. I was already contemplating that beam above the desk by the time Chandra Suresh showed up at my door and told me he thought I was special . . . and we all saw how that turned out. ”

“I didn't know.”

He watched out the corner of his eye as she fidgeted with her hands. “Neither of us really know much about the other, do we?”

“I guess not,” she said, then brightened. “I know peach is your favorite kind of pie!”

He sucked air through his teeth. “About that . . . I may have exaggerated a little. It's actually my second-favorite. It's stupid, but nobody ever brought me pie before, and there you were with your little dish towel and everything, so I just . . . I didn't know what I was supposed to say.”

“What kind is your first-favorite, then?”

“Cherry.”

“That's my favorite Slush-O!” She giggled, wincing at the inanity of the statement, but he smiled along.

“Good to know.” His grin faded. He didn't know her, never had. But he could.

There was a bit of black fluff clinging to her shoulder, a thread from his decimated shirt. He casually reached to pick it off, lets his finger graze her skin ever so lightly. She smiled at the touch. He reached out to her with the ability Angela Petrelli had fed him, the power to read histories from objects. He closed his eyes, wincing at the rush of sensations.

The feel of Claire's hand clenched in hers, the other white-knuckled on the airplane armrest as she pours all her electricity into his teenage niece.

The sound of glass breaking when she knocks him through the door of the laboratory where he killed Maya, that used to be the studio where he killed a precognitive painter.

The musty smell of concrete walls as she slips around the door of a cell almost like this one—Primatech facility in Hartsdale? Odessa?—beaming giddily at a man he doesn't know, blond and pretty.

The bitter taste in her mouth as Bob Bishop tucks himself back into his pants.

And the image of a hand swooping towards her face, yellow palm at the end of a dark arm, the man they called the Haitian. Again and again and again. In some of the flashes he's barely more than a boy. Often there are people behind him: Bishop, Bennet, the doctor he killed in Texas, or in some of the earlier ones another stranger, a tall man, hawkish, who watches with pity and disgust.

He pulled his hand away, folded the other around it as if he could rub away the memory of what he'd just seen. The silence was stretching out, too long. He had to fix it, distract himself and her; say something light. “Do you know the song I mentioned?”

She shook her head. “Not by name. I might recognize it if I heard it, though.”

Gabriel blushed and looked at the floor. He sang, a little weak but not unmelodious, “as soon as I get my head 'round you, I'll come around catching sparks off you. I get an electric charge from you, and secondhand living just won't do.” He raised his head and his voice, just a little. “And the way I feel tonight, I could die and I wouldn't mind, and there's something going on inside . . . makes you wanna feel, makes you wanna try, makes you wanna blow the stars from the sky, and I can't stand up, I can't cool down, I can't get my head off the ground.”

He glanced at her, wincing, expecting her to mirror his embarrassment. She looked entranced, grateful, wretched and beautiful.

“No one's ever done anything like that for me before.” She didn't mean the song.

Gabriel shook his head. “You forgave yourself, Elle. We're all at war with ourselves, that's what it means to be human. The trick is figuring out how to be on the winning side.”

He watched her deflate with a sigh, swallowing back tears. There was a half-second delay between the lighting up of her raised hands and of her down-turned face. “You wanna try?”


	3. Charlie Big Potato

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Last piece of prologue: wakey wakey, Elley bakey.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the last Heroes story I will ever post; the story I got into the fandom to tell. Has been sitting mostly finished on my hard drive for ages, finally decided to fill in the gaps as best as I can now, years later, and put it out there.
> 
> Content notes & warnings: For the series, general “mature content”--violence, gore, sex, 'coarse language'. For this part, human barbecue with moderately graphic description of burn trauma. Technically AU from 3x11 (probably), though everything onscreen happened as we saw it up to 3x21.

_I awake from blood-thick dreams_

She coughs, a lung's complaint over asking for air and getting smoke. Her eyes are stinging. Her throat is dry, raw. She can smell singed hair and cooking meat. She doesn't know where she is but it's bright and loud and she doesn't like it. Her skin is burning . . . her _skin_ is _burning_ . . .

The apprehension of being on fire shakes her out of the fog somewhat. She knows there's something you're supposed to do about that . . . A cursory assessment reveals that she's already stopped and dropped, so she rolls.

She rolls over and over onto her belly, crushing the flames into damp sand. She feels her blistered skin scrape off and pull away, along with clinging tatters of black shirt. It hurts, so she sobs, which makes her cough again because her mouth is all full of ash. Weakly, clumsily, she splays her hands into the soft, rough ground, pushing up onto her elbows, peeling out of her own charred carapace . . . and is amazed to discover underneath not raw flesh weeping blood but fresh new skin, pale and unblemished.

“The fuck?”she rasps, sitting up and scuffing sandy palms over her bare breasts, tender but undamaged.

Bewildered and frightened, she looks around. On a beach . . . she was on a beach before, but it was night-time, and the water was farther away, and Gabriel . . .

“Oh God,” she moans. A wave of nausea hits her as the memories come flooding back. When they don't stop, it becomes a tsunami.


	4. Climbing Up the Walls

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He hasn't stopped thinking about her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the last Heroes story I will ever post; the story I got into the fandom to tell. Has been sitting mostly finished on my hard drive for ages, finally decided to fill in the gaps as best as I can now, years later, and put it out there.
> 
> Content notes & warnings: For the series, general “mature content”--violence, gore, sex, 'coarse language'. For this part, suggested violence. Technically AU from 3x11 (probably), though it only really breaks from what was aired starting here, during 3x21.

_Either way you turn, I'll be there_

He hasn't stopped thinking about her.

It's been months since he killed her, left her burning by the ocean that cloudy morning in California, but she's been with him every day since.

Everywhere he goes he sees her, or thinks he does. A face in the crowd, out the corner of his eye, riding the up escalator while he rides down. A couple of times he's given in to the urge to chase, but it's never her he catches. Other times he'll hear her laugh, or sigh, or the murmur of his name. Sometimes he smells her, a waft of ozone on a clear day, sharp and blue.

He's tried everything to make it stop. Quit killing cold-turkey, went days without harming a soul, or glutted himself with blood, mangling civilians beyond recognition. Nothing helps. Even after he died in Hartsdale, her home burned to rubble around his smoking bones; even after he solved the mystery of his parentage, confronted his hollow-shell father; she still won't leave him alone.

He dreams about her, but that's not exactly surprising under the circumstances. What's weird are the other dreams, the ones he's sure aren't his. She's in those too, pretty often, but when she is she's usually him, or he's her, or something. Even taking strange cuts and dream logic into account, these ones confuse him, full of people he doesn't remember and conversations he doesn't understand.

He's almost used to it now. It's become a part of his routine: wake up, make coffee, hallucinate your dead girlfriend, go to work. Work right now is taunting a spook into helping him become a shapeshifter, which is at least interesting enough to mostly keep his mind off her.

This Arlington day's soundtrack has been punctuated by crashes of thunder and flashes of lightning, so he doesn't think much of it when he catches whiff of a familiar scent on his way down from the roof to Martin's apartment after hanging up his call to Danko.

He strolls in, dripping wet, and makes it halfway across the living room before he notices something's wrong. He turns around, zeroing in on the slender, shadow-swathed figure lurking between two windows. Atmospheric light floods the room and he freezes, genuinely surprised by what's revealed.

“Elle?” She takes a step towards him but doesn't speak.

His first instinct is to attack her with her own ability, but given that his hair and clothes are still drenched from the rain this proves to be a bad move. He grunts and blinks away the pain.

She snorts, derisive but with an air of affectionate forbearance, and his hope that this is another hallucination, a trick thrown up by a telepath or an illusionist, or a cruel joke by Martin or another shapeshifter, becomes suddenly very tenuous. She takes another step and he raises his hand, as much to ward off the apparition as in preparation to flick her against the wall.

“How did you get here?”


	5. Extraordinary Machine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thought she was a goner, but the cat came back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the last Heroes story I will ever post; the story I got into the fandom to tell. Has been sitting mostly finished on my hard drive for ages, finally decided to fill in the gaps as best as I can now, years later, and put it out there.
> 
> Content notes & warnings: For the series, general “mature content”--violence, gore, sex, 'coarse language'. For this part, violence (specific warning for chemical burns: NaOH = sodium hydroxide = lye) and coarse language. Technically AU from 3x11 (probably), though it only really breaks from what was aired starting here, during 3x21.

_Be kind to me or treat me mean, I'll make the most of it--I'm an extraordinary machine_

“How did you get here?”

“G-men kicked the door in, remember? Lock's broken.” She steps out of the shadows, into a pool of lamplight. “But that's not what you meant.”

She's barefoot, wearing a black dress. Her hair is barely longer than his, curling around her face in a tousled pixie, but aside from that she looks no different than when he last saw her. Except she does, because she's not limping, not scarred, and as far as he can tell not deceased.

“I've been following you. Not always following in the strict sense of tracing out your path already taken—sometimes when you zagged I zigged—but the result's the same. The girl takes the path of needles while the wolf takes the path of pins, they both wind up at Grandma's house eventually.”

“How long?”

“You know how long,” she says like it's obvious, then inclines her head. He can read her reading him: he wants her to prove herself, tell him something no one else should know. Fair enough. “Since the day after the eclipse. You left me for dead. Well, strike 'for'.”

She picks up a plastic jar from the coffee table. He doesn't remember seeing it there when he checked the place out earlier. She passes it from hand to hand while she talks, sloshing the liquid inside. “It's pretty goddamn rude you know, taking off like that. I wake up on a strange beach, alone, _on fire_ , with no idea what's going on? I suppose greeting me with waffles and a nice fluffy robe would have been a lot to ask, but you could have at least stuck around.” She cocks her head at his persistent look of wary confusion. He gets the feeling now that she's the one testing him, and he's not doing well. “You thought it didn't work, didn't you? That's why you never came looking for me. Why you tried to destroy the evidence.”

He shakes his head a little and she frowns.

“You gave me Claire's ability.” Her eyes narrow when his widen. “You didn't know? How could you not—oh, you fucking bastard. You utter asshole. You really meant to kill me!”

The jar comes up like she's going to throw it at him, freezes there for a moment before her arm falls back against her side.

“I don't know why I'm surprised, after all the shit I've watched you pull these past months. You're thirty-one flavors of crazy and then some; I can't even begin to keep up. I guess I just hoped . . .” She closes the distance between them, looking wistful.

“You know, I had this whole fantasy about what I'd do when I found you. It started with hurting you, of course, killing you once for every day you left me on my own, but then there was make-up sex and revenge on those who've wronged us. Actually, I still kind of like that plan.” She's only an arm's length away now, smiling sweetly up at him as she opens the jar. He reads NaOH between her fingers on the label. “At least the first part.”

A flick of her wrist splashes the contents in his face. He screams until he can't while his face blisters and dissolves.


	6. Bossa Nova

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sylar regains consciousness in an awkward position; Elle thinks it's time for a chat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the last Heroes story I will ever post; the story I got into the fandom to tell. Has been sitting mostly finished on my hard drive for ages, finally decided to fill in the gaps as best as I can now, years later, and put it out there.
> 
> Content notes & warnings: For the series, general “mature content”--violence, gore, sex, 'coarse language'. For this part, graphic violence, torture, lotsa blood and coarse language. Much, much longer than the preceding pieces. Technically AU from 3x11 (probably), though it only really breaks from what was aired starting here, during 3x21.

_I'm the luckiest girl_

Sylar regains consciousness before his eyes have finished regenerating, and is treated to the bizarre experience of watching the world construct itself from a dim perception of light, to a sense of motion and shape, to a three-dimensional plane of recognizable objects and nameable colors.

“Wow,” Elle says from somewhere nearby, out of his line of sight. “I gotta say, I've seen some nasty shit in my life, but that was something special. I spent all this time coming up with witty epigrams about how it's the lye-ing that hurts the most, but that was so gross it made them all seem tacky.”

He tries to retort but his throat is still too raw. He manages a hostile gurgle. His healing head rolls from side to side, assessing his condition. He must have been out for a while, long enough for her to strip off his shirt and shoes, lay him out spreadeagle . . . and nail his wrists and ankles to the floor.

“Ice cream?” Elle offers, looming into view with a carton of Ben and Jerry's and a spoon. “There's a whole freezer full, and it's not like James Martin's going to miss it.”

Sylar grunts again, stretching out his fledgling tongue, then manages hoarse words. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I got him.” She points two fingers, peers down her hand like the sight of a gun. “Pew, one shot, when your new secret agent pals flushed him from the building. They didn't see a thing.”

“You killed Martin.” It's a statement pleading for a denial.

“Oh, quit pouting. What were you going to do with his power anyway? Turn into a girl and lounge around all day whacking off?”

Sylar struggles to look aloof, hoping his recovering skin will conceal his blush. “Absolutely not.”

“Never even thought about it, huh? Shame; you could use the practice.”

She returns the ice cream to the kitchen. While her back is turned Sylar tests his bonds. The nails wiggle a little but hold. However, his blood is slowly soaking into the floor, swelling the wood and slicking the metal. With a little more time . . .

Elle dances back, skirt fluttering and splaying around her thighs as she kneels to straddle him. She withdraws a scalpel from her dress pocket, bites the plastic cap to pull it off and spits it across the floor.

“You might as well be beating the meat, the shit you're wasting time with these days. That quest to find your real daddy—was he everything you hoped for? Are you fulfilled, now that you know the truth?” She smirks at his wounded scowl and wounds him further, slicing diagonally across his chest, then again to mark a spot over his heart. Outside the rain has once again lightened to a drizzle.

“What about that kid you were hanging out with, my replacement road-trip buddy? I'll admit, that made me jealous. I was going to kill him when you were done with him, but I expect he'll take care of that himself soon enough. Only question is whether he'll take his whole school with him when he does. And then there's your new project, playing cat and mouse with that vulture-looking motherfucker. Is this really your idea of 'dangerous game'?”

“How did you--?” He breaks off with a hiss when she traces the scalpel around his nipple, pressing six o'clock just hard enough to break the skin and drawing a wavering line towards her thigh.

“I told you. I've been following you.”

“Why?”

Her mouth twists sourly and she slashes the taut line connecting his shoulder and chest. Her nose wrinkles as she dodges the bright jet of arterial spray. She doesn't lean quite far enough and her left arm is spattered with tiny specks like too-red freckles.

The cut heals and Sylar tries again. “Why are you doing this? You can't kill me.”

She laughs out loud. “You're right, I can't kill you like this. But think a little harder on that statement. You've survived guns and knives and fire, congratulations. What if I flattened you with a steamroller, could you spring back from that? Or cracked your head open, popped your brain in the microwave? Pureed it in a blender? Or decapitation—sure, if I put the pieces back together fresh they'll probably reattach, but what if I waited until your flesh was marbled and maggot-eaten, or shriveled up so your bones showed through? Would you keep gabbing as a head in a jar or would your brain die without blood to feed it?”

He opens his mouth, then shuts it again.

“You don't know.”

“Do you?”

She wipes blood from the scalpel with her thumb, smears it between her fingertips. “Adam did. Probably.”

“Who's Adam?”

“The first of our kind, or so he liked to brag. I didn't buy it. He did have over three hundred years to play around, and enough sense of self-importance to sacrifice other regens to the cause of his own survival. I'm sure he found out plenty of ways to kill us permanently, and since I can't find hide nor hair of him now I'm inclined to believe he finally ran up against one himself.”

“You are going to—permanently?” He sounds a little breathless, tells himself it's an appropriately cautious alarm.

“Maybe. Not today. Not while I still need you.”

“Then why trap me here, why torture me? Is this retribution for killing you? Or trying to?”

Elle waggles her head as she carves into his abdomen through layers of tissue. “Yes, but not only that.”

“What then?”

“You deserve it.”

“Because I'm a murderer?”

“Please,” she snorts. “How many people have you actually killed? A few dozen? I ran out of toes to count on ages before Daddy had to send a nurse to explain why I woke up with blood in my pajama bottoms.”

Gabriel's eyes flick away, embarrassed, defensive. Watches raindrops twitchily clump together and roll fat and heavy down the pane. “I killed my mother.”

“Really? What a coincidence, me too! I was _four_. Anyway accidents only count for a half-point.”

“I killed your father.”

“Getting warmer, still no inferno.”

He takes a deep breath and looks her in the eye, growls with as much authority as he can while nailed to waxed parquet. “Elle, why have you trapped me here?”

“It was convenient?” she quips, then sighs. “Fine.”

She poises the scalpel just below his sternum and presses down, holding the blade in place long enough for blood to pool around it in the shallow concavity. He grunts at the weapon's withdrawal, raising his head to watch as Elle flips it around, dipping the tip of the handle in her bloody inkwell and tracing her narrative in stick(y) figures on the skin of his belly.

“You've read the story of Prometheus? He was a Titan. His name means 'forethought'. He had a brother, Epimetheus, king of staircase wit. Prometheus got on Zeus's bad side doing favors for humans, and the final straw was smuggling fire from heaven. Zeus punished humanity by commissioning the manufacture of a pretty lady named Pandora and sending her to Epimetheus, who gullibly welcomed her into his home along with her urn of woe; I'm sure you know how that one goes. Zeus also punished Prometheus by chaining him to a rock and sending an eagle to rip out his liver every day—he was immortal, of course, so the tasty treat grew back at night. This daily torment continued until Hercules wandered by and released him, but that's another story.”

“I take it you're the eagle.” He nods at the hook-beaked head at the edge of his ribs, which looked, at least upside-down, more like that blue Muppet Sam than any live bird he'd seen.

“See, that's the part I'm not sure of yet. I might be the eagle, or I might be Hercules. Heck, maybe I'm the rock.”

“This looks pretty eagley to me.”

“Call it an audition piece, then.”

“Fine. Can you at least tell me, O Story-teller, what it is I'm being punished for?”

“You know.”

“I don't.”

“But you do. You know now, and you knew then too. What I didn't. What you shouldn't have, couldn't have if Angela Petrelli hadn't fed you that ability, the power to read objects. I'm not sure it's a coincidence that she sent me away before that, worried that seeing my history'd weaken your loyalty to her, although how she avoided giving her game away with that one I can't guess.”

Gabriel closes his eyes, suddenly remembering that first day of their second acquaintance as vivid and acrid as the smell of his own singed flesh. He realizes that he's been avoiding using that ability as much as possible since that day, fearful of what he might receive. “Oh,” he says, wry enough to taste the bitterness, “that.”

“That. Tell me,” she leans forward, clutching both sides of his face, the blade of the scalpel flat and sticky against his temple as her breath tickles his nostrils, “where have I been? What paths have I walked? Whose hands have worn down this object, and what were all these parts before they were me?”

“I don't know. I never read—just one little peek, and after that . . .” He didn't want to. He was _afraid_ to. Couldn't steal her secrets, then, couldn't violate her like that, but more than that couldn't face meeting her demons, the horrors she couldn't even remember. Not when he was fighting so hard to get a leash on his own. “I needed your forgiveness, your strength. For that you had to be opaque, a mystery. I needed you to be whole.”

She laughs, an expulsive hiss, and presses her cheek to his. “I was never whole.”

He grits his teeth, fighting the tingle of his nerves begging to feel what she felt. Her fingers dig into his scalp and her lips move next to his ear. “So much came back to me after you screwed my head back on. So much they didn't want me to know.”

There's fire, of course. Fire is how it began, and ended, and began again. In between there's concrete, and glass, and rubber—bits of tubing to bite down on, and gloves to insulate the hands of those who had to touch her. Stringy hair kept short for years keep it from tangling too badly, until she was old enough to wash it without sparking. She couldn't even wash her hands and face at the tap, then; antiseptic wipes cleaned her skin and stung when they came close to her eyes. Then, to soothe her, a bribe and reward for cooperation, something sweet and sticky—candy, or a popsicle, or a cherry slush.

Two years growing feral in the care of professionals who barely spoke to her, forgetting how to love. No more Mommy, and Daddy glimpsed only rarely, always from a distance, never close enough to touch. Not until she could turn it off, until she was _trained_ to turn it off. She was so proud then, so happy, she thought things would get better. She would go home and live with her family again, that's what they promised her. They lied. They let her have toys and furniture then, things that wouldn't burn, but that wasn't the same as going home. Mommy never came back. Daddy did, but he wasn't the same. He still wouldn't hold her at first, wouldn't touch her, and that was terrible. Then he did, and that was worse.

Odd, that she could be so alone, so friendless, when there were so many people in her world. Some of them were nice to her (she thought) and some of them were mean, but few of them stayed very long. Eventually there was a boy, tall and skinny like a sapling, and he was gentle, but he took things away. Big chunks at first, tearing rough clumsy holes in her mental fabric that left her frightened and sick for days. He got better though, got so good he could snip out a single thread, knot the ends and she'd never notice.

She got older, and stronger, and learned how to play. Learned how to make it hurt, and how to make it feel good. Learned how to kill without leaving a mark. Ought to have learned how not to get attached to her pets, because she never got to keep them for long, but didn't seem to have the knack for that. They let her keep most of those memories, whether because they deemed her sufficiently molded or because they worried over the damage they'd already done was hard to tell. Time passed, and she forgot forgetting. Until he destroyed her, fixed her, left her on the beach.

Eventually Gabriel comes back to his own body, his own torment, the mad fragile creature on top of him, murmuring. “ . . . was a library, in the facility where I grew up. Books for the staff and some of the detainees. There was a dictionary of classical mythology, hardcover, no pictures but I could see it all in my head like a movie, the heroes and the monsters. I memorized stories and told them back to any grown-up who stayed still long enough. Some of them even listened, paid attention enough to correct my pronunciation. Bennet did, at first, when he was around. Claude did, until he got away. Rene took that book from me the first time he wiped my memory, before he knew how to isolate. I forgot that I knew the stories, but not the stories themselves. Probably why, when Adam told them to me again, I felt like I already knew them.”

She was sitting up now, her fingers stroking gently across his forehead, the scalpel abandoned on the floor. One smooth horizontal line above his eyebrows. “Midas touched his daughter too, but she turned to gold. I turned into . . . well.”

“I'm sorry.”

Her lip curled in scorn. “Don't apologize for that. _That_ wasn't you. You have enough transgressions to atone for, don't go helping yourself to other people's.”

“Then what do you want me to apologize for? For not telling you? You don't exactly seem happier now that you know.”

“For what you did to me, how many times do I have to say it?”

“But I still don't understand what you think I did!”

She scowls and scoops up the blade again, thumbing its sharp edge. “It's the name of another story, too, you know. 'The Modern Prometheus'. It's the subtitle to _Frankenstein_ , that cautionary tale of perverted nature, supermen, and fucking around with what you don't understand and cannot control.”

“You're completely unhinged.”

“You're damned right I am! It's the only sane response, after what I've been through.”

Sylar growls and rends his flesh bucking against his restraints. “Why are you here?!”

“You made me and left me for dead! Only you fucked it up, didn't you, because now I'm worse than dead. I can't stop, can't die. You ripped me out of nature and every day the rip gets bigger. You made me a monster!”

“You made me!” he howls, knocking her away from him with the force of his voice, the power he took from that wannabe bank-robber. “I was nothing before you people came along, just another nobody and prepared to die that way, sooner or later. If you hadn't cut me down, if you hadn't betrayed me and run away from me, none of this would have happened. But _you_ told me I was special. _You_ made me into a monster, and you set me loose on the world. Everything I did, all the blood on my hands, it was because of you!”

He punctuates his speech by ripping his hands free from the floor, one at a time. One nail stays in the floor, the other in his arm. He pulls it out and tosses it away, casting an arc of bloody specks across the room, then reaches for his ankles.

Elle, meanwhile, picks herself up from the crumpled heap in which she landed like a broken marionette, correcting the articulation of her broken limbs.

“See, that's an interesting point,” she says calmly, as if she's not smoothing out the contour of a shattered cheekbone, “because much like people calling the creature by the name of its creator, 'a Frankenstein', when you started calling yourself Sylar you didn't just take the name of the watch-maker. You took the name of the _watch_.”

They pull themselves up to standing as one, keeping the width of the room between them as the last patches of damaged flesh sew back together.

“So here we are,” Elle says, wiping bloody hands on her stained dress, “damaged goods paying it forward. You made me, I made you, a whole army of Bishops and Grays and Bennets and Petrellis provided the materials. A matched set, inseparable, or at least inevitable.”

He shakes his head, bewildered and afraid of understanding.

“Don't you get it yet?” she quirks a wry smirk. “I'm your forty-two.”


	7. Mind's Eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Danko arrives for his scheduled meeting with Sylar.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the last Heroes story I will ever post; the story I got into the fandom to tell. Has been sitting mostly finished on my hard drive for ages, finally decided to fill in the gaps as best as I can now, years later, and put it out there.
> 
> Content notes & warnings: For the series, general “mature content”--violence, gore, sex, 'coarse language'. For this part, violence, gore and coarse language. Technically AU from 3x11 (probably), though it only really breaks from what was aired starting here, during 3x21.

_I'm gonna know you when you finally come_

“I'm your forty-two.” Sylar frowns, and Elle smirks, head cocked. “Come on now, I know you've read this one.”

“I get the reference, I just have no idea what you're taking about.”

“I'm your answer, the answer to the question you didn't know how to ask. You opened me up and played with my brain, and now I've come home full of everything you need to know.”

“And what's that?”

“Don't look at me. The answer's no good without the question, and that's not my department.”

Sylar scoffs. “Wonderful.”

“You think I'm happy about this? You brought me back from Hades with a chain around my neck. I can't leave you. And you, clueless fuck, may not have noticed, but you can't leave me either. Your line of flight has been swerving to my gravity well as much as mine to yours. Have you been enjoying my dreams, by the way? Because I've got to say if the ones I'm getting are typical, yours are pretty dull.”

“My dreams . . . What happened to you? Why did you come to me now?”

“I just gave up fighting it. From the day I woke up, with my clothes and hair all singed off and smelling like barbecue, I've been trying to get away from you, but the farther I tried to get the closer I wound up finding myself. Like struggling against quicksand, it all kept sliding back to you, until I finally worked out what it was sucking on my brainstem. That actually made it easier to go my own way for a while but no matter who I killed or how many times and ways I tried to kill myself I still felt that pull squirming at the back of my head, until I got bored with resisting the call out of stubbornness and well-earned distaste and thought up a few ways to have fun once I got here.” Elle stretches her neck with a crack and shakes out her shoulders, then quirks her lips again in a semblance of a smile. “I tore you up because I wanted to, because of what you did to me and because I could. I found you because I couldn't not.”

“I felt you. The whole time. I knew you were out there.”

Elle nods and rolls her eyes again, exasperated that he's taken so long to work it out.

“What are we supposed to do know?”

“I'm not sure we're 'supposed' to do anything. As much like fate as our connection feels, if there's a guiding intention behind it I've yet to identify it.”

“You said you have the answer to my question but you don't know what it is. How do I find the question?”

“I don't know. That's not the question.”

Sylar's lip curls as he opens his mouth to speak again, but the words dry on his tongue when his skin prickles with cold. There's a handgun digging into the base of his skull, nuzzling like a metal-snouted dog. A sidelong glance locates Danko, reflected in the window, professionally managing to keep his gaze mostly on Elle rather than flitting around the carnage of the room.

“What the hell is going on here?” he rasps.

“Mr. Danko. I hate to have to default on our agreement but unfortunately,” Sylar nods at Elle, who casually wipes her bloody hands on her dress, “she killed Martin.”

“Elle Bishop,” Danko says slowly. “Missing, presumed dead. Last seen in your company.”

Elle clucks her tongue. “He thinks we're working together. That this was a trap.”

“It's not?”

“Why would I want to help the asshole who killed me?”

“Killed you.” Danko sounds nonplussed. “How are you standing there, if he killed you?”

She shrugs sweetly. “I got better.”

“Elle Bishop was an electrokinetic.”

“You want me to prove I'm her?” Elle asks. “Really? Okay.”

Elle's hand twists as she rolls up a ball of lightning in her palm and throws it, a curve ball that arcs shallowly around Sylar's body and sends Danko sprawling away from him. Sylar turns and raises his arm, lifting Danko off the floor and holding him in midair.

“I realize that it might look bad, me calling you and then telling you it's a bad time when you get here, but as you can see I am kind of in the middle of something right now. You understand.” He pushes Danko slowly back against the wall until he sticks like a fridge magnet, then holds his own body perpendicular to it, glancing at Elle. “Why now, then? If revenge was all you wanted you'd have come sooner, so there must be something else. You want—need—my help. Why, with what?”

“Simple. I have a plan that needs tools to execute, and your ability, the one you started with, the only one that's actually yours, is one of them. The point of the plan is answers, and payback on all the twisted characters who lined up the dominoes for our mutual fall. Plus, if we're lucky, if we find the elements of the big equation, we just might be able to break the spell and get on with killing each other, properly.” She smirks. “What do you say, tiger? You up for a _real_ challenge?”

Sylar leers back at her. With a flick of his wrist he discards Danko's limp, hanging figure like a doll he's lost interest in, knocking his head against the wall hard enough to concuss the former and dent the latter. He steps closer to Elle. “I take it that means you're done hurting me for the time being. What did you have in mind?”

Elle laughs.

“Oh, honey. I'm not even close to finished hurting you.”


	8. Set the Grass on Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The porn chapter.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Probably the last Heroes story I will ever post; the story I got into the fandom to tell. Has been sitting mostly finished on my hard drive for ages, finally decided to fill in the gaps as best as I can now, years later, and put it out there.
> 
> Content notes & warnings: For the series, general “mature content”--violence, gore, sex, 'coarse language'. For this part, a balanced breakfast of sex and violence. Technically AU from 3x11 (probably), though it only really breaks from what was aired starting here, during 3x21.

_You ain't gonna get off easy_

She comes at him fast, claws out, scratching his cheeks as she grabs his head and yanks it down so she can press her mouth to his, more biting than kissing, smearing their already bloody lips together and sucking at the fresh red eruption. She sweeps one of his legs out from under him and he drops to that knee with bruising force so that she towers over him, cranking his head back with a fist on his scalp.

Sylar snarls and spits blood in her face when she pulls back, wiping her own chewed-up lip on her shoulder. She spits back and knees him in the groin, then in the face when he curls in on himself. Another knee in the ribs while he's balancing on one hand trying to reset his broken nose knocks him onto his back and she straddles him again but this time it's frantic, hungry, she's fumbling for his trousers and reaching under her skirt to push aside her panties and open herself with bloody fingers.

Of course he's already hard when he reaches for her, gripping and twisting handfuls of flesh and digging in with his nails, biting whatever he can reach. She's finally starting to break a sweat, adding another salty exudation to the streaked blood garnishing her skin. She's not gentle when she pulls his cock out, grabbing it from the base and twisting, and he hisses through teeth closed tight on her right breast and bucks up toward her all the harder. Elle frees one hand to pull his head back and slap him across the face, then sucks his bloody tongue into another punishing kiss.

Sylar squirms back on the floor, kicking halfway out of his jeans so that Elle can get a hand behind her and between his thighs to squeeze his balls with almost crushing force. He whines with desperation when her bloody finger finds his asshole and she laughs, teasing his opening with incongruently agonizing gentleness before she plunges two fingers roughly inside. Sylar cries out and thrusts up, sliding his cock against her slippery cunt over and over until she shifts her hips to let him slide inside. He tries to take it slow, tease her back, but she slams her hips down suddenly, taking all of him in one sharp plunge. Elle presses two fingers of her other hand into his mouth, pressing down on his tongue and allowing him to bite her briefly before she twists her wrist so that her fingers are hooked inside his cheek and she can steer his head like a fish on a line, a horse on a bit, twisting him around to let him know that she controls the fuck, driving fast and deep into him and into her.

He comes embarrassingly fast, with her teeth on his neck, but she refuses to let him stop, sending a stinging electrical signal through his prostate to keep him hard and aching, throbbing even after his balls have emptied. He growls and lunges up to bite her ear, tearing at the flesh, and she comes too, overloading, sending arcs of blue light out to touch all the outlets and lighting fixtures, shorting every plugged-in electrical device in the room, but she doesn't stop fucking him, slamming herself down onto his cock and her own sparking fingers with bruising force and wringing out orgasm after shrieking orgasm.

When she's finally as exhausted and sore as he is, finally ready to stop, release him from his rigid paralysis and roll off of him to the floor, the rain has returned to speed the darkening of the early evening sky, and streetlights pick out streaks of water on the destroyed apartment's windows. Sylar keeps an arm around her, now that he doesn't have to, and scratches hard and idle at her skin, sticky but unblemished.

“Tell me we're going after Bennet first,” he says, and his tongue feels swollen and unfamiliar.

She laughs, breathlessly. “How did you know?”

“You've been dreaming about it.”

She nods. “Of course there's no way he'd let either of us get close enough, not knowingly.”

“No, I don't imagine so.”

“Good thing I didn't actually _kill_ James Martin,” Elle says, climbing back onto his lap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all she wrote. I did have vague plans for a sequel to this, involving Elle and Sylar using shapeshiftery to seduce, abduct, and impersonate Noah Bennet and then . . . stuff. I didn't have an ultimate end planned, and even if I did I'm Done with this fandom and unlikely to write in it again. Feels cathartic to finally post all this, at least.


End file.
